California
Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher met with WikiLeaks founder Julian
Assange Wednesday in an effort to obtain information about the source
of a leak of Democratic officials’ emails.

Rohrabacher
told The Daily Caller in an exclusive interview Thursday that Assange
is hoping to leave the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he is
currently in asylum, and that during the meeting they explored “what
might be necessary to get him out.”

The
congressman told TheDC that “if [Assange] is going to give us a big
favor, he would obviously have to be pardoned to leave the Ecuadorian
embassy.” Assange took asylum in the embassy in August 2012 after
facing sexual assault charges in Sweden. The Justice Department also
reportedly wants to charge Assange for helping Edward Snowden, a
former NSA analyst, leak thousands of classified documents.

“He
has information that will be of dramatic importance to the United
States and the people of our country as well as to our government,”
Rohrabacher said. “Thus if he comes up with that, you know he’s
going to expect something in return. He can’t even leave the
embassy to get out to Washington to talk to anybody if he doesn’t
have a pardon. Obviously there is an issue there that needs to be
dealt with, but we haven’t come to any conclusion yet.”

The
U.S. intelligence community has said Russia was involved in the
hacking and leaking of emails from the Democratic National Committee
during the presidential election. Assange has continued to maintain
that Russia was not WikiLeaks’ source and has long maintained that
he would never reveal a source.

Rohrabacher
has been maligned by opponents for being too favorable to the Russian
government, and was called “Putin’s favorite congressman” by
Politico. He told TheDC that these attacks are due to people’s
efforts to “obscure information that would be damaging to their
political positions.”

“They
can’t fool the American people all the time, especially if there’s
some dramatic information that would expose this monstrous fraud that
has been perpetrated on the American people and thus undermining an
elected president and his ability to take the responsibility given to
him by the voters,” Rohrabacher stated.

The
California congressman met with Assange along with conservative
journalist Charles C. Johnson. Johnson is frequently attacked as just
an internet troll, but he is well-connected to several key political
figures. He told TheDC that he arranged the meeting between
Rohrabacher and Assange.

Rohrabacher
told TheDC that Johnson “stepped in as a friend” to help him on
his overseas trip. The congressman went to London on his own dime and
Rohrabacher is the first U.S. representative to visit Assange.

A
pardon of Assange would have to come directly from President Donald
Trump, and Rohrabacher told TheDC, “I can’t remember if I have
spoken to anybody in the White House about this.”

The
congressman has yet to receive the information that has been promised
to him by Assange, but he said he is confident he will receive it.

“If
I had to bet on it, I would bet that we are going to get the
information that will be mind-boggling and of major historical
significance,” Rohrabacher said. He said if it is significant
enough, he will bring it directly to Trump.

“And
there has already been some indication that the president will be
very anxious to hear what I have to say if that is the determination
that I make,” Rohrabacher added.

2017
the year of the rogue tsunami: Tsunami's in strange places...Iran
Holland Greenland and more not thought to have been caused by a
quake!

A
video by DAHBOO777 showing
a series
of events which took place in South America and South Africa
sometime around August 10th was sent into me by Chessie Crow
Gartmayer showing a terrifying tsunami along the west coast of
Africa which was not caused by a quake.

A drastic amount of sea
water receded from several places along the South American coast.

He
also claims he caught a huge wave anomaly over this region around
this same time shown on a MIMIC Radar System.

On the other side
of the ocean, people witnessed huge waves crashes, (Tsunami)
crashing into the shores along South Africa's western coast, you can
find the video belowThe
video alerted my attention to the fact that the tsunami along the
South African coast is only one of many rogue tsunamis which The Big
Wobble has reported this year.

Back
in March 2017, reports of a tsunami hitting South Iran on the
internet appeared to be incorrect, as no quake large or small has
not been registered in the area yesterday.

However
large waves were filmed smashing into the port city of Dayyer in the
southern Iranian province of Bushehr where at least one person has
lost his life and five others were reported missing.

Search
and relief operations were ongoing to establish the fate of the five
missing with divers deployed to the scene.

Deputy
Interior Minister and Head of the National Disaster Management
Organization Esmaeil Najjar told IRNA that the incident in Dayyer
and Assaluyeh damaged several residential homes, boats and shpis.

He
added that the waves were estimated to be more than three meters
high.

What
caused the waves remains a mystery.

Photo
Photo Press Tv showing the devastation after the tsunami...

Back
in June and just a few miles from where I live footage
emerged of a tsunami hitting the coast of The Netherlands catching
beachgoers off guard with a seven foot tidal wave.

According
to local media, the phenomenon is so rare that it is the first time
it has been so well filmed and documented.The
first reports of an approaching tidal wave of a medium height were
at around 5.45am on Monday morning.In
footage shot from the balcony of a flat in the coastal resort of
Zandvoort, the wave can be seen sweeping away beach chairs, boats
and parasols.The man
filming is heard saying 'a tsunami!' multiple times in disbelief at
what he is seeing.

You
can see the video below.

Also
in June four people are 4 people where reported dead along with 39
homes swept into the sea after a tsunami hit Greenland's west coast,
police have said.

The
surge of water is also reported to have swept away 11 homes in the
village of Nuugaatsiaq. Police chief Bjorn Tegner Bay said he was
unable to confirmed there had been fatalities, according to KNR,
Greenland's broadcasting corporation.The
authorities were not sure weather a small rare earthquake caused
the tsunami or a landslide.According
to the police chief, it struck off Uummannaq, a small island well
above the Arctic Circle. Meteorologist Trine Dahl Jensen told Danish
news agency Ritzau that for such an earthquake to hit Greenland was
"not normal", as she warned of the risk of
aftershocks.See
the video below.

Incredible
huge tsunami waves rolled into Durban beachfront, South Africa,
freak waves rolling into Durban beachfront on Sunday 12 March 2017…
as rough seas battered the KwaZulu-Natal coastal resort in South
Africa.Locals could be seen fleeing the beach as huge wave broke
onto the shore front, see below.

Thursday, 17 August 2017

Changing
the journalism of climate change

Claims that
the government "cheated" on carbon emissions made headlines
recently, but those in the know said this was actually old news. It's
a sign reporting on the issue needs to change, an international
expert in climate change journalism tells Mediawatch.

But
lately the headlines here have highlighted how little New Zealand has
achieved in cutting emissions.

Paula
Bennett had told the UN New Zealand was aiming for 90 percent of
electricity from renewable sources by 2025, but on Tuesday RNZ
reported industry
insiders saying that was highly unlikely.

And
even before she left for New York, the government's emissions
policy was under fire

"The
government can no longer bluff its way with the help of unreliable
carbon credits,” the Dominion
Post said
in a strongly-worded
editorial.

The
paper wasn’t alone in castigating the government over the trade in
so-called junk carbon credits overseas.

How
did this come to light?

"We
Cheated!" screamed the cover of last week’s New
Zealand Listener magazine,
advertising a dramatic lead story about "dodgy
credits" which had "done nothing to reduce emissions".

Back
in October last year, prior to the Paris climate change
summit, Listener writer Rebecca
Macfie wrote another detailed cover
story for
the magazine - and an even longer
one for the magazine’s website -
which said companies here were importing so-called joint initiative
credits from countries including Ukraine and Russia.

Overseas
research, she wrote, had concluded "in 80 percent of cases
... these credits have little or no environmental integrity".

That finding
was at the heart of the recent Listener cover
story too, but some said the "carbon cheat" claims were not
news.

No
surprise?

"I
waded through the Listener article
on how New Zealand has rorted - and been rorted by - the
Emissions Trading Scheme over the past eight years. And by the end of
it, I thought: 'No kidding I saw that coming,' said Andrew
Dickens, in a
comment piece for Newstalk ZB’s
website.

“The
'shock horror' reaction to the report dubbing New Zealand a 'carbon
cheat' this week is hardly news,"BusinessDesk.co.nz editor
Pattrick Smellie said in an
opinion piece for Fairfax Media. He
said there was an outcry about the so-called junk carbon credits
earlier, and their purchase had already been banned in New
Zealand.

So
why no headlines back then then? Pattrick Smellie wrote:

"The
issue was complex and barely covered in mainstream media. Hence the
belated outrage today, thanks to racy packaging by the Morgan
Foundation."

Publishing
in partnership

It
was indeed economist Gareth Morgan's foundation which 'broke' the
story about the scale of the purchases, in partnership with
the Listener. The
story made wider news the following Monday when the magazine appeared
in print, and the full
Morgan Foundation report appeared
online along with an article
in The
Spinoff.

Some
jourmalists had pointed out the problem of junk carbon credits long
ago. A year ago, the New Zealand Herald’s economics editor Brian
Fallow wrote

It
seems the Government plans to rely heavily on a hoard of cheap,
low-quality carbon credits to meet its current climate change target.
Or at least pretend to
meet it. But if that is the plan - its achieved by completely
subverting the Emissions Trading Scheme.

A
carbon credit is a creature of the Kyoto Protocol and will have no
value unless it comes into force. That will happen if and only if
Russia ratifies it. If Russia does ratify the question then will be
how much of its "hot air" credits get released into the
market.

Quite
a lot were, and New Zealand companies were in the market for them

But
if a dodgy practice undermining New Zealand's carbon emissions policy
went mostly unreported until the Morgan Foundation got involved this
month - why?

Professor
Robert A Hackett is an international expert on journalism and climate
change, and was in Wellington this week speaking
about the topic.

He
told Mediawatch he
was alarmed the media did little to bring the apparent rorting
of New Zealand's emissions trading scheme to public attention while
it was still going on.

"Carbon
trading is rife with scams. Journalists should be surveying the scene
for developments we need to know about. It should have been the
responsibility of journalists to tell that story and make it
interesting," said Prof Hackett, from Simon Fraser
University in Vancouver, Canada.

The
public interest - and what interests the public

Online
tools now allow editors to know precisely how popular their stories
prove to be with online audiences. Naturally, they want more of the
content people click on and less of the rest.

Articles
about environmental threats on the horizon, it appears, rarely
harvest a lot of online traffic.

Last
week, New
Zealand Herald science
reporter Jamie
Morton pointed outthe
Morgan Foundation Report wasn’t the only alarming climate research
released in recent days. Another recent release was a Royal
Society report, warning even
modest rises in sea levels climate change could swamp significant
areas of coastal New Zealand - but this was not widely reported
in the media here.

"This
hinders reporting of climate change," said Prof Hackett.
"Research in Canada shows that people concerned about climate
change - but who are not yet politically active on the issue - want
climate treated as a a matter of politics, not just of science,
environment or technology."

Journalists
reporting on all these areas should be tasked by editors with
covering climate stories together.

Better
and stronger together

"We
shouldn't just leave this up to journalists battling against economic
retrenchment," Prof Hackett added. "You need to find ways
to sustain and finance public interest journalism. In Canada, for
example, we are exploring tax-exemptions for non-profit journalism
organisations."

In
the 1990s, a public journalism movement brought some US news
organisations together to report major issues. Prof Hackett said the
recent co-operative effort that went into the Panama Papers could
also be a model to follow.

There
have been some shifts. Before 2000, the reporting of climate change
in the US was hamstrung by concerns about balance, with contrary
views from climate skeptics often given equal weight.

"This
confused the American public about the consensus among the majority
of climate scientists. The US press has [now] moved away from fake
balance," Prof Hackett said.

"If
genuine climate scientists start questioning their own theories, that
should be reported ... But there's a difference between skepticism
based on science and opposition based on ideology or vested
interests."

"Such
warm Arctic temperatures reflect recent findings in the 2016 State of
the Environment, the annual summary of the global climate, from the
American Meteorological Society, released Aug. 11, that says the
Arctic is "is warming at more than twice the rate of lower
latitudes."

"In 2016, the average temperature of land surfaces
north of 60 was two degrees Celcius above the 1981 to 2010 average,
breaking the previous record of 2007, 2011, and 2015 by 0.8 C, the
report said. That represents a 3.5 C increase since record-keeping
began in 1900, said the report, which includes a special section on
the Arctic."

Nunavut
locals cooling off in the Arctic ocean as warm records tumble in the
High Arctic islands

Unseasonably
warm temperatures over the past weekend saw people in the western
Nunavut hub of Cambridge Bay heading out to their cabins or the
beach, where some even dipped into the Arctic Ocean to cool
off.

However, it wasn't so long ago-for example, in 1974,
according to Environment Canada-that you could expect to find snow
on the ground at this time of year.

Recently, temperatures have
been rising 10 degrees or more above normal ranges for this time of
year in Nunavut's Kitikmeot region and the High Arctic islands,
where the weekend's heat wave broke Environment Canada
records.

Cambridge Bay's high temperature of 22 C on Aug. 11
broke the previous high temperature of 20.5 C for that day, recorded
in 2013.

Temperatures remained warm in Cambridge Bay throughout
the weekend-21.6 C on Aug. 12 (breaking the previous high of 21.4 C
from 2013) and on Aug. 13, when the high reached 21.9 C (breaking
the previous high of 18.9 C set in 1949).Taloyoak's high of of
21.8 C and Kugaaruk's high of 22.8 C on Aug. 12 also broke records
for the day.

Kugaaruk's even-warmer high of 24.3 C on Aug. 13
then broke the previous high record temperature of 21 C, set on that
date in 1985.

On Aug. 12, the hottest spot went to Bathurst Inlet
where the mercury rose to 33.5 C, breaking the station record of
32.2 C set in in 2013

Kugluktuk also saw a high, but not
record-breaking, temperature of 26.6 C on Aug. 10-with more warmth,
and a high of 21 C predicted by Environment Canada for Aug. 14.

Pond
Inlet and Arctic Bay, with temperatures of 18.3 C and 18.4 C
respectively, on Aug. 13, also broke previous recorded temperatures
for that date.

Today Iqaluit is also set to enjoy some
above-average temperatures, with Environment Canada forecasting a
high of 16 C-six degrees above the usual 10 C temperature for Aug.
14.

Such warm Arctic temperatures reflect recent findings in the
2016 State of the Environment, the annual summary of the global
climate, from the American Meteorological Society, released Aug. 11,
that says the Arctic is "is warming at more than twice the rate
of lower latitudes."

In 2016, the average temperature of
land surfaces north of 60 was two degrees Celcius above the 1981 to
2010 average, breaking the previous record of 2007, 2011, and 2015
by 0.8 C, the report said. That represents a 3.5 C increase since
record-keeping began in 1900, said the report, which includes a
special section on the Arctic.

"Rapid change is occurring
throughout the Arctic environmental system," the report said,
with many signals indicating that the "Arctic environment
continues to be influenced by long-term upward trends in air
temperature."

Biblical
amounts of rain: Nearly 3 times the monthly ave 184mm or almost 7
inches drench Bangalore overnight the highest recorded amount ever

Photo
skymetweather.comthe Big Wobble,16 August, 2017When Bengalore went to sleep on Monday night,
the city had received 44.8mm of rain for August. When it woke up on
Tuesday morning, that figure had risen by 128.7mm - the highest
rainfall in a day since 1890, according to the Met department.It
made up nearly 300% of the rain expected over the entire month,
pouring down on the city from 11pm on Monday to 4am on Tuesday.The
highest-ever rainfall recorded in the city in a day was on August
27, 1890, when Bengalore received 162.1mm of rain, the monthly ave
for Sept August is 62.8 mm.According to the Karnataka State
Disaster Monitoring Centre (KSDMC), that record was broken on
Tuesday.It said the city received 184mm of rain since Monday
night, the highest being recorded in Bilekahalli. The overnight rain
flooded several parts of the city, submerging parking lots and
entire road stretches, and snapped power in vast swathes since the
early hours of TuesdayThe Yediyur lake breached a retaining
wall, while foam from the Bellandur lake flowed to neighbouring
localities.Over 40 rescue boats came out in ST Bed area of
Koramangala, while the fire department was called to flush out water
from apartments in HSR Layout, Koramangala, Jayanagar and
Bannerghatta Road, among other areas.At least 26 trees were
uprooted.Wildlife volunteers received panic calls as snakes
entered homes in Rajarajeshwari Nagar, JP Nagar, Nagarabhavi,
Thanisandra, Uttarahalli and Puttenahalli.

Floods continue to batter Bihar, several dead

The
situation in Bihar continued to remain grim with the death toll
climbing to 72. The flood has affected nearly 73.44 lakh people
across 14 districts. Several parts of the state continue to be
inundated following incessant rains in Nepal and northern part of the
state.